Sunday, May 20, 2012

A ROAD IS NOT A ROAD

. . . ; a street is not a street; a lane is not a lane. The
proposition is that while vehicles have standards that define their possible
performances, thoroughfares that provide for these vehicles have a necessary
hierarchy in their role that relates less to possible standard performance of these vehicles
than to the character of their particular contexts. Instead of having all
roads, streets and lanes changed to provide for the optimum functioning of the
standard vehicle, whatever vehicles these might be - the larger ones,
four-wheel drives or rubbish trucks, frequently define the parameters - roads and
streets need to be carefully constructed and detailed to accommodate - to
respect, to enhance - their different environments. This thought has arisen from
the ever-growing notion that roads, streets and lanes have to be upgraded for
all vehicular options in spite of their location; that the variation has to be
provided by the road rather than by any restriction or modification in
vehicular performance, access or driver behaviour. The logic is that vehicles
must be able to go anywhere there is a gap that they might fit into, in spite
of the location, and at speeds and with safety requirements universally applied
as scheduled in the standards. Unless roads, streets and lanes are considered
carefully, they will become like most other matters in our world - the same
everywhere. Diversity will be lost - even in thoroughfares.

Roads with a unique character are being mutilated by
engineers who work to standards and use standard detailing, irrespective of
context, because this is what the standards say. No further thought is given to
alternative options. Narrow, winding mountain roads with their heritage timber
bridges are being widened to allow all and any vehicle to use them at the
standard speed. The idea that the road should define the vehicles that might be
able to use the road and require modifications in the drivers’ actions, seems
to be given no thought. It is dismissed even without the safety argument being used
as an excuse.

One Local Government Councillor argued that because one
steep, curving and narrow mountain road that was kerbed on one side and open to
steep falls into a forested area on the other without any safety barriers, was
a public road, it should be available for all and everyone to use at standard
speeds - and beyond - without any restrictions or extra supervision. This was
in spite of the quaint old signs erected when the road was first pushed through
- ‘ROAD CLOSED TO THRU TRAFFIC’ and ‘25KPH.’ When it was pointed out that
neither Council nor police were enforcing the instructions on these signs,
Council removed the signs - Gold Coast Division 12 logic. That this particular
road - the road going over Burleigh Hill on the Gold Coast - is one of the very
few roads with a special bush character on this glitzy strip, made no
difference to any argument or outcome: just irrelevant, even though the narrow
road is used frequently by joggers and walkers who enjoy the challenge of the
grades and the different bush environment. Council will not even consider
defining the road as a special zone. It has left the ‘LOCAL TRAFFIC ONLY’ signs
at each end and one ‘25%’ gradient sign, opening the road to every driver,
(they are all ‘local,’ whatever this might mean), who seeks the challenge of
speeding over hills while taking what is believed to be a shortcut. There is a
great ambition to use shorcuts in the Australian psyche, even if they mean more
travel time and distance. And who cares? Certainly not Council or the police –
or Main Roads. One is simply told by the State government that it is not one -
see your Council; speak to the police : and so one is flicked around getting
nowhere. Here, this unique thoroughfare that fits beautifully into its quiet
surroundings, is left open to standard speeds and all traffic - buses, trucks,
fire engines, and cranes - when they have no essential need to use this road.
Argument goes nowhere, as Councils, and especially Councillors, always know
best. Even when clearly shown to be wrong, they simply respond boldly and
arrogantly with the message that they will no longer respond to any
correspondence on these issues - go away silly boy, we’ll do what we want. It
is astonishing that one is told that there is always the option of leaving the
area if one so chooses! Gold Coast Division 12 logic: we don’t want controls or
restrictions, just growth!

Springbrook Road is another road suffering the same ruthless
neglect under the same Council - Division 9. This unique, historic thirty-kilometre
drive up the hinterland border mountains behind the Gold Coast - promoted as
‘the green behind the gold’ and mocked as ‘the greed behind the gold’ because of the ad hoc development that is approved - is a
narrow, steep, winding road that used to be a one-way up/down road at various
times of the day. It leads to the Springbrook plateau and continues right along
this high region as its spine, to the end lookout, to reveal the great expanse
of the Gold Coast’s random development in a distance that is growing smaller
day. Yet even here, on portions of this road, the road authority is upgrading
this heritage track to highway standard detailing, widening sections; painting
bright white lines on the centres and edges, constructing massive concrete
bridges over delicate creeks, making pedestrians appear as awkward participants
on highways that ban all walking. The terrible truth is that Springbrook is
substantially a National Park region, but even this makes no difference. Main
Roads Queensland - this is a main road - still constructs to standard details
that are used everywhere - go away silly boy. The narrow flow of rocky-cool
water that splashes the fine and fragile foliage on its steep banks means
nothing. A bridge is just a bridge - the concept is set in concrete and the
bridge is made of it.

That roads and their associated parts should be defined by
their locations, needs to become a principle that must be enacted. Without this
approach, all roads will lead to the same experience - self-centred places of
broad, bitumen speed with flashy, galvanised barriers, bold coloured,
reflective signs and an airstrip glow of dazzling lights that laugh at
everything around them. Vehicles must be curtailed - restricted in either
access or performance; or both - if regions are not going to be destroyed by
road engineers. One can gauge these engineers’ preferences when one hears
pedestrians being referred to in casual conversation as ‘peds,’ turning people,
their feelings and experiences into universal numbers, engineering facts and
schedules of figures.

The universe is not universal. Just as diversity in flora
and fauna is now coming to be seen as a critical matter for the survival of our
world, so too the diversity in roads, streets and lanes needs to be respected
and understood as being essential to our wellbeing. Turning everything into the
same only creates a boredom and changes minds and places. Turn variety into one
and it will be susceptible to the many that can kill it - in one simple step.
We are slowly - but more quickly every day - killing the very things we love
the best because our vehicles are being given preference over everything, when
they are the mobile machines that can so easily adjust to the particular
circumstance. Just go slow, carefully and avoid other areas. Drive vehicles to
suit the road, street or lane; do not insist that every road, street and lane
becomes a motorway.

I say vehicles, but there are other situations of the same
ilk where vehicles of another era become the problem. Horse riding in reserve
areas has the same problem - the demand that access be allowed for all. BMX
cycles have a similar impact; four-wheel drive quads too. The motorised
vehicles cause the greatest problem - even in the same locations. The authority
of the 4X4 makes demands on these same areas as if they had a right to go
anywhere at any time. One can see the workings of the mind of the 4X4 drivers
in how they love to climb kerbs and mount traffic islands in urban and suburban
areas, suggesting that just because they can, they must. Just because vehicles
can do certain things gives them no essential right to do it. We must curtail
random open access to everywhere on the basis of context. Politicians hate to
say no, but leaving everywhere open to all and sundry as a right only makes
everywhere the same - just like politicians and their silent bureaucrats! We
need to think again and differently.

LIVING IN IMPERMANENCE

Maybe it is a good thing for us to keep a few dreams of a house that we shall live in later, always later, so much later, in fact, that we shall not have time to achieve it. For a house that was final, one that stood in symmetrical relation to the house we were born in, would lead to thoughts – serious, sad thoughts – and not to dreams. It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.

Gaston Bachelard The Poetics of Space

see: THE NECESSITY OF THE INCOMPLETE in the sidebar

ON MAKESHIFTS & DISCOMFORTS

Experienced architects will recognize . . . . . a trait of human nature which leads certain clients who are discerning in requiring the nicest efficiency in the arrangements made for them, to rejoice in makeshifts and discomforts of their own devising.

ARCHITECTURAL PRACTICE

. . . no one can relieve (the architect) from the need to rely on his own discretion, for that discretion is linked to a responsibility which belongs to no one but (the architect). It is the exercise of discretion hampered by considerations of cost, of risk, of exact justice, of conflicting interests, of uncertainty as to facts, of misunderstandings and of diverse individualities and dishonest or incapable agents, which is the chief care and preoccupation of architectural practice. To design a building, to draw and specify every part of it, and to direct its construction and see it completed with no other anxieties and dilemmas than belong to the exercise of those duties, is unknown.

About Me

This blog site is a collaborative initiative. For years there has been a discussion with friends and colleagues about the lack of critical debate and general review on matters concerning our environment, its making, maintenance and our understanding of it. Once our newsletters promoted these issues, but events have taken their toll as times and technologies have changed. So it has been decided to grasp the new tools and begin again afresh – doing only more of the same with a renewed vigour.

SPAN

17 August 2012

This blog began as a co-operative concept. While the idea and the stimulus was generated through discussion, the blog has turned out to be an individual enterprise. SPAN stands for ‘Spence and’ in the context of others. As a word, it fitted in nicely with the idea of voussoirs - parts and pieces, complete with keystones, that could ‘span’ the gaps in understanding and communication. The word SPAN also allowed for a shared input into a blog.

Spence Jamieson is an architect and the author of these articles. The blogs show the scope of his interests.

E-MAIL

Followers

voussoirs

THE IDEA

chapters and verses as architectural commentary:

the wedge to isolate, array and shape ideas; the keystone to highlight core, supporting issues.voussoirsis a concept to start an architectural discussion to span the large gap in the debate on things architectural; a bridging of the void in architectural issues by exploring considered bits and pieces. The state of the profession today is highlighted by silence and self. It is introvert and protective. Educational centres remain isolated within their own constructs, being run primarily as businesses. They put very little back into the community. They indulge themselves in their own interests and exclude contrary and different ideas and ideals. They constantly avoid any challenge on concepts or strategies that might change the plotted course. Rarely does comment ever come from this academic world into the public or any arena. Very few publications help direct the public interest. Rarely do newspapers grasp the issues and explore them. One aspect may be given space in the popular press, but architectural debates and concerns are rarely given attention. The professional institutes are doing much the same as the educational institutions. Private practice is doing likewise, offering, if anything, only its own pushy propaganda to the public. Yet there is a discussion and debate in these silences that needs a larger and more open platform. Discussion is alive and well amongst a few in at least one curry house, but the debate needs to be a broadened.voussoirsis the place for this discussion. It is a site for ideas, comment, articles, and critiques on things architectural and associated issues. It is here that matters can be aired and ideas discussed and debated without fear of the neglect and disdain that institutions and private groups and publishers give to open speaking and differing ideas.

There can be no true understanding of any idea if discussion and debate are curtailed in favour of a preferred position.

The images used to illustrate these blogs that have not been taken by the author have been sourced from Google Images and are used under the ‘Fair Use’ rule.

THE NECESSITY OF THE INCOMPLETE

The early 50's and 60's is a period that is gaining interest in architectural ideas. Perhaps this is why Princeton chose to republish The Tao of Architecture. It is a beautiful little book that discusses the implications of traditional wisdom in architecture. Given the astonishing lack of direction in current architectural theory, the publication is very timely.

Laotzu's idea of formation is heavily concerned with emptiness or non-existence. To him who regards nothing as persistent, what is essentially important in things is the possibility of becoming something, not the opportunity of remaining as something confronting deterioration. Consequently, meaningful incompletion is taken as the most desirable state of tangible being.

p.22

. . . the full meaning of existence is beyond the power of any manifestation. What appears tangible, architectural or natural, is only a means to suggest that which is lacking in appearance and existing in man's intangible understanding and aesthetic feeling.

HOW POETRY COMES TO ME

It comes blundering over the

Boulders at night, it stays

Frightened outside the

Range of my campfire

I go to meet it at the

Edge of the light

Gary Snyder

www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/snyder/onlinepoems.htm

THE GROWTH OF SIZE

Size does not necessarily count in architectural space. It is the growth of size which is vital.

THE REAL AND THE IMAGINARY

I prefer, by far, real islands to imaginary islands, just as I prefer prime documents to novelistic remakes. That's because the real is richer than the imagination. The real demands investigation and is an invitation to sensitive knowledge, whereas the imaginary is more often than not just a collection of stereotypes, a soup of clichés offering an infantile kind of satisfaction. Then, a relationship to the real and its resistance requires changes in thought, in ways of being, in ways of saying, it leads to a transformation of the self. Whereas imagination is nothing but compensation. There's even something horribly autistic about sitting in one spot and spinning out invention by the yard. How much more interesting an open and poetic process involving contemplation, study, movement, meditation and composition.

ULTIMATE THULE

VISION, CIVILIZATION & SPIRIT

The architect who combines in his being the powers of vision, of imagination, of intellect, of sympathy with human need and the power to interpret them in a language vernacular and time - - - is he who shall create poems in stone.

When you look on one of your contemporary 'good copies' of historical remains, ask yourself the question: Not what style, but what civilization is this building? And the absurdity, vulgarity, anachronism and solecism of the modern structure will be revealed to you in a most startling fashion.

It cannot for a moment be doubted that an art work to be alive, to awaken us to life, to inspire us sooner or later with its purpose, must indeed be animate with a soul, must have been breathed upon by the spirit and must breathe in turn that spirit.

Louis Sullivan

FROM DELPHI

KNOW THYSELF

and next to this:

NOTHING IN EXCESS

AN UNCHANGING PROFESSION

Blenheim Palace . . .Many of the builders went unpaid for years as the disputes dragged on, and most eventually got only a fraction of what they were owed. Building work ceased altogether for four years from 1712 to 1716, and many of the unpaid workers were understandably loath to return when work resumed. Vanburgh himself didn't get paid until 1725 – almost exactly twenty years after work started.

Bill Bryson At Home A Short History of Private Life Black Swan London 2016, p.213

MENDING WALL

Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, And spills the upper boulders in the sun, And makes gaps even two can pass abreast. The work of hunters is another thing: I have come after them and made repair Where they have left not one stone on a stone, But they would have the rabbit out of hiding, To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean, No one has seen them made or heard them made, But at spring mending-time we find them there. I let my neighbor know beyond the hill; And on a day we meet to walk the line And set the wall between us once again. We keep the wall between us as we go. To each the boulders that have fallen to each. And some are loaves and some so nearly balls We have to use a spell to make them balance: 'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!' We wear our fingers rough with handling them. Oh, just another kind of out-door game, One on a side. It comes to little more: There where it is we do not need the wall: He is all pine and I am apple orchard. My apple trees will never get across And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'. Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder If I could put a notion in his head: 'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it Where there are cows? But here there are no cows. Before I built a wall I'd ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offence. Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him, But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather He said it for himself. I see him there Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed. He moves in darkness as it seems to me~ Not of woods only and the shade of trees. He will not go behind his father's saying, And he likes having thought of it so well He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

Robert Frost

FLIGHTS OF FANCY

I must caution my young friends not to expect much novelty in these discourses, for novelty and flights of fancy, however amusing, cannot be very instructive.

Sir John Soane The Royal Academy Lectures edited by David Watkin Cambridge University Press 2000 p.29

CATHEDRALS and SYMBOLISM

Everything is the symbolical representation of an idea. p.28

The same artists, who had to follow a strict rule when treating the history of God, could use all of their imagination when treating the ornamental: whence the blossoming of the grotesque and the original. p.38

In those days religion, drama, and art had the same aim and sought to provoke the same thoughts. They did not pretend to amuse the people; they endeavoured to teach them. p.51

This way of thinking and reasoning takes sometimes a very subtle turn. p.53

THE COMPLIMENT & THE CRITIC 2

More on how to avoid insult

And if in the endeavour to discharge the duties of my situation, as pointed out by the laws of this Institution, I shall be occasionally compelled to refer to the works of living artists, I beg to assure them that, whatever observation I may consider necessary to make, they will arise out of absolute necessity, and not from any disposition or intention on my part merely to point out what I may think defects in their compositions. For no man can have a higher opinion of the talents and integrity of the architects of the present time than myself, nor be more anxious on all occasions to do justice to their merits and fair pretensions to fame.

Sir John Soane The Royal Academy Lectures edited by David Watkin Cambridge University Press 2000 p.29

ON DEMOLISHING BUILDINGS

Nothing appears to me much more wonderful, than the remorseless way in which the educated ignorance, even of the present day, will sweep away an ancient monument, if its preservation be not absolutely consistent with immediate convenience or economy. Putting aside all antiquarian considerations, and all artistical ones, I wish that people would only consider the steps, and the weight of the following very simple argument. You allow that it is wrong to waste time, that is, your own time; but then it must be still more wrong to waste other people’s; for you have some right to your own time, but none to their’s. Well, then, if it is thus wrong to waste the time of the living, it must be still more wrong to waste the time of the dead; for the living can redeem their time, the dead cannot. But you waste the best of the time of the dead when you destroy the works they have left you; for those works they gave the best of their time, intending them for immortality.

John Ruskin Lectures on Architecture George Routledge & Sons Limited, London p.109

THE COMPLIMENT & THE CRITIC 1

How to avoid insult

But how much of nature have you in your Greek buildings? I will show you, taking for an example the best you have lately built; and, in doing so, I trust that nothing that I say will be thought to have any personal purpose, and that the architect of the building in question will forgive me; for it is just because it is a good example of the style that I think it more fair to use it for an example. If the building were a bad one of the kind, it would not be a fair instance; and I hope, therefore, that in speaking of the institution on the mound, just in progress, I shall be understood as meaning rather a compliment to its architect than otherwise. It is not his fault that we force him to build in the Greek manner.

LIFE AND THOUGHT

The popular supposition that an industrial revolution, by means of a new technique such as cast-iron, changes architectural style is an inadequate thesis. By changing life and thought it also changes radically the whole function and aesthetic of architecture.Robert Furneaux Jordan, Victorian Architecture, Pelican, Harmondsworth, 1966, p.36.

ON EDUCATION

'. . those who are responsible for giving instruction in the theory of architecture should be practising architects. The warning is necessary because, strange though it may seem, English schools of architecture to-day tend to be run by men who either do not practise at all, or whose practices are for them a very subsidiary spare-time occupation. Often a teaching appointment is a means by which a clever student avoids the humiliation of entering an office as a junior assistant, thus depriving himself of the only opportunity he will ever have of learning something of the practical side of his profession from the bottom upwards. There can be no doubt whatever that the teaching of theory has suffered severely as a result of this habit: and this leads me to the conclusion that no man should be permitted to teach until he is recognized by his Faculty as a Master of Theory and Practice. In other words, he should be not only a practising architect but also, what is unfortunately a much rarer specimen, a good architect.'

ON STAINS

'The mouth kisses, the mouth spits; no one mistakes the saliva of the first for the second. Similarly, there is nothing necessarily impure about dirt. What must be determined are the conditions under which a surface marking is experienced as a stain.'

Mohsen Mostafavi and David Leatherbarrow, On Weathering . The Life of Buildings in Time, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, p.109

'. . . . . it may lead us to the Grounds of Architecture and by what steps this Humour of Colonnades comes into practice . . . . .'Christopher Wren

ETHICS

Thus Pugin laid the foundation stones of that strange system which dominates the nineteenth-century art criticism and is immortalised in the Seven Lamps of Architecture: the value of a building depends on the moral worth of its creator; and a building has a moral value independent of, and more important than, its esthetic value. We must not consider this emphasis on morality peculiarly Victorian. Whenever esthetic standards are lost, ethical standards rush in to fill the vacuum; for the interest in esthetics dwindles and vanishes, but the interest in ethics is eternal.

Kenneth Clark The Gothic Revival - An Essay in the History of Taste, (1st edition Constable 1928); third edition John Murray 1962, reprinted 1974, p.149.

ALIENATION

Then, as now, alienation was said to have disappeared in a society of abundance, leisure, and consumption.Andy Merrifield, Henri Lefebvre A Critical Introduction, Routledge, New York, 2006, p.45.

EVERYDAY

Man must be everyday, or he will not be at all.

. . . .

What is the goal? It is the transformation of life in its smallest, most everyday detail.

Henri Lefebvre, Critique de la vie quotidienne, 1947.

FASHIONABLE FORM

They will only remain to later ages as monuments of the patience and pliability with which the people of the 19th century sacrificed their feelings to fashions, and their intellects to forms.

John Ruskin,Lectures on Architecture and Painting, Routledge, London, 1854: p.42

DRAWING WATER

MODERNITY

The everyday is covered by a surface: that of modernity. News stories and the turbulent affectations of art, fashion, and event veil without ever eradicating the everyday blahs. Images, the cinema and television divert the everyday by at times offering up to its own spectacle, or sometimes the spectacle of the distinctly noneveryday; violence, death, catastrophe, the lives of kings and stars – those who we are led to believe defy everydayness. Modernity and everydayness constitute a deep structure that a critical analysis can work to uncover.

Henri Lefebvre, The Everyday and Everydayness, in Stephen Harris and Deborah Berke, Architecture of the Everyday, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 1997, p.37.

NAMING

The simplest act of substitution is to put the name of a maker in the place of his or her work, which amounts to a paraphrase in itself. . . . All paraphrase sets aside the original: To put the name in place of the painting is to remove it from immediate consciousness; to narrate the life of an individual is an act profoundly different from looking into a painting and one that cannot be conducted simultaneously with it. To substitute a temporal narrative, already present in a name, for the physical work of art is to give up those features of the thing that were transient and unrepeatable, bound to a moment that is irrevocably ended; the unique insistence is, for the moment at least, sacrificed on the altar of continuity.

Thomas Crow, The Intelligence of Art, The University of North Carolina Press, 1999, p.1.

what is a voussoir?

BEGINNINGS

There is always a beginning before the beginning. (p.63)

No one had ever been able to remember. That’s the problem with beginnings. (p.61)

The story of memory always begins with a room . . . interiors . . . remind us to remember. (p.15)

Edward Hollis, The Memory Palace A Book of Lost Interiors, Portobello Books, London, 2013

ON BRANDING

Branding is now the art of getting people to think what something might be rather than what it necessarily is. It's about the manipulation of the virtual reality in which so many live. The manipulators include anyone with an interest in what we might think of them - not just big companies with products to sell but political parties with votes to win, design gurus with clients to attract - anyone, in other words, acting in some kind of market. They all have an interest in controlling their appearance to make us believe it is the reality.

John Humphrys Beyond Words How Language Reveals The Way We Live Now Hodder and Stoughton. Great Britain 2006, p. 86-87

PRECONCEPTION

Leone Huntsman Sand in Our Souls The Beach in Australian History Melbourne University Press 2001, p.16:

Thus first impressions were filtered through existing preconceptions, starkly revealed in Sir Joseph Banks's description of the people seen from Captain James Cook's Endeavour when it first touched on the Australian continent in 1770:

In the morn we . . . [discerned] 5 people who appeared through our glasses to be enormously black: so far did the prejudices which we had built on Dampier's account influence us that we fancied we could see their Colour when we could scarce distinguish whether or not they were men.

Here Banks refers to William Dampier's unfavourable accounts of the West Australian aboriginal people in published accounts of his landings in 1688 and 1699, and reveals his own awareness of the extent to which perception was influenced by expectation.

JARGON

The world seems to find it necessary to use more and more jargon in general reporting and conversation. It is especially noticed in accounts and discussions on the arts. The ABC TV arts programme presented on 7 January 2017 at 6:15pm had more jargon than usual; indeed, had more unusual expressions than previously encountered, ones that had not been heard before:

"unpicking the tapestry" of one's life;

and

looking at "the fan deck of what you do."

These reminded one of other popular fashionable expressions:

“to unpack an issue,” meaning to analyse it in some detail;

and

“to segue,” meaning to shift to a new topic or activity.

This last term is a favourite of radio announcers. The Italian word is often misspelt as ‘segway’ because of the similar phonetic sounding that is more commonly understood as Segway, the brand of a human transporter.

The parallel is interesting, as the idea of being ‘transported’ is common to both words, but it seems to hold little interest to the radio voices that appear just too cleverly happy with the use of this different, interesting expression.